【推荐1】Seventy-year-old Tububatu and his wife live in a village on the edge of Badain Jaran China’s third-largest desert. Since their retirement, they’ve been spending every day fighting the advancement of the desert with the help of plant-life. Others had tried fighting the desert and failed, but they just wanted to know if they could make a difference.

Relying only on their pensions, the retired couple have been slowly and steadily growing their little desert forest. They started out by planting just 50 trees, but kept doubling their efforts to the point where they now plant thousands of trees a year. Even though they mostly plant drought-resistant (抗旱的) species, they still water them at least once a day to make sure they grow better. Their small desert forest now covers over 266 hectares (公顷) and numbers tens of thousands of trees.

The couple stay behind in their village, nearly 100 kilometers away from the nearest town, despite their children’s efforts to get them to move with them to a more comfortable home. They’ve been made fun of by other villagers who believed their efforts to fight the desert were sure to fail, but they haven’t let that prevent them making their efforts. They may very well fail, but at least they’ve given it their all.

Over the last 19 years, the couple have planted over 266 hectares of desert and have no plan of stopping anytime soon. China Daily reports that Tububatu and his wife have so far planted over 70,000 trees and spent more than 1 million yuan of their savings in the process. The bad conditions have caused a lot of damage to their health. They look older than their age, and they both have been battling serious health conditions, but they refuse to abandon their battle against the desert.

【推荐3】In the late afternoon, fifteen-year-old Saanya Hasan Ali can often be found in the comfortable family room of her home. But she isn’t doing homework and she isn’t in front of a computer screen. She is cutting, drawing, measuring, gluing and folding. “I just love arts and crafts,” says Saanya. whose talent for designing and making greeting cards is matched by her dedication (奉献) to helping children and families in need. During the past six years, she has raised an astonishing $26,000 through the sale of her cards.

Saanya’s unexpected success began, when her family moved from Houston to Washington, DC. “My mother received an e-mail from friends who bad just founded the Pennies for Education and Health (PEH) organization. They were raising money for children in Gujarat, India to be able to go to school.” explains Saanya, who was nine at the time. Her mother, Salma, offered to donate $75 in Saanya’s name, a sum that would pay for one child’s schooling for a year. But Saanya decided she wanted to raise the money herself. “I was in the third grade then and I couldn’t even wrap my mind around the fact that kids couldn’t go to school over there” she says. Saanya and her mum unpacked one of the moving boxes filled with Saanya’s crafts supplies, and she made cards to sell at a family wedding that summer. To her surprise, she earned $600 — enough to send eight children to school for the year. “I kept on making cards and the following summer I was able to help support the kids for another year,” explains Saanya, who by then had established her own non-profit organization called Children Helping Children. One of her goals now, she says, is to support the schooling of these first eight children until they graduate from college.

“I would love to continue making cards,” says Saanya. “Now that I am in high school, I would also like to start giving talks in inner-city schools to try to inspire other kids to do their own projects. No matter who you are, there is always an opportunity to make a difference.”

【推荐2】Last year,Karen Wooldridge and his friend Laura Hogan had an idea: Take unsold flowers which will be thrown away and send them to old people.“We started working on our kitchen island, and we were really proud of sending flowers,“Wooldridge said. Soon, Hogan added,“We developed.”

Now, they send a thousand unsold bunches of flowers a month, with 150 volunteers working five days a week. Their organization,Bluebirds &. Blooms,is named after their childhood youth troupe(剧团)The Bluebirds.Their flowers brighten 30 communities—mostly homes for seniors who are losing their memories.

Vellie Larson has lost some of her memories, but her daughter Karen Schwartz was in the same Bluebirds troupe as Wooldridge and Hogan, and Larson taught them all music.“When they send flowers to her,”Schwartz said,“She’ll describe them to me and give me a flower report every day.”

“The flowers are also a hint that someone cares,”said Shery Hassan, the center’s director.“They’re sad, and just having such a simple thing as a bunch of flowers brightens their days,”Hassan said.“Families will come in, and they’ll say,’Oh who got you flowers?This is beautiful.’And it says’Thinking of you.’The seniors can just say,’Oh,somebody was thinking of me!’”

For Wooldridge,the act of kindness brings back great memories of her father,who had Alzheimer’s(老年痴呆).“I know he would have loved visits from these women，”Wooldridge said. And while some might find it difficult to work so closely with those fighting with memory loss, Hogan said,“It makes us happy. We’re doing something good.”

【推荐1】Reporter Hilde Kate Lysiak got the tip early Saturday afternoon that there was heavy police activity on Ninth Street. She hustled over with her pen and camera, as any good reporter would. Shortly after, she posted a brief online report to break the news. Then, after talking to neighbors and the cops, she wrote a full-length story and this headline:

“MURDER ON NINTH STREET!”

The online story went up before the local daily paper had published anything. Lysiak also included a short video from the crime scene, assuring viewers that she was working hard on finding out the details.

Hilde is a dedicated journalist who loves going after crime stories. Her father, Matthew Lysiak, is a former New York Daily News reporter who took Hilde to his newsroom and to stories he covered around New York. Those early experiences made Hilde want to be a reporter.

Hilde launched the Orange Street News when she was 7. “I just like letting people know all the information,” Hilde said. It is also what she sees as her career for the rest of her life. At first, she covered businesses and schools and any other local news, and she did so well that she was profiled in the Columbia Journalism Review and on the “Today” show. Still, covering crime is her main interest. “It’s just what I really want to do. And crime is definitely my favorite.” She said she learned of the murder story because “I got a good tip from a source.”

Matthew Lysiak said his daughter “doesn’t have a lot of fear. She just wants to get the stories out. And she really wants to report real news.” “Because of my work, I was able to inform the people that there’s a terrible murder,” hours before any other reporters even got to the scene. “In fact, some of the adult-run newspapers were reporting the wrong news or no news at all.” said Hilde in the interview.

【推荐2】Michael and his wife had recently moved into a new apartment building in SanFrancisco when they met a neighbor who is an Indian priest (牧师).

The priest, Jeff Dunan, 77, told Michael about an organization he volunteers for, which provides food, clothing and essential supplies to poor people in northern Bangladesh. The man decided to donate to the GoFundMe campaign, and settled on$150. “I thought it was a good cause, and a neighborly thing to do,” he said.

Shortly after making his donation on the GoFundMe campaign that day in February 2022, though, Michael received information from his credit card company, warning him of a suspiciously (可疑地)large business. He opened the text message, which warned him of a $15,041 charge from GoFundMe. When he saw the five-figure number, he couldn’t believe it.

Soon, it all made sense. Michael’s credit card number started with four and one. Clearly, he said, he accidentally began typing his credit card information while his cursor(光标) was still in the donation box.

Michael called GoFundMe’s support line in a panic and explained the mistaken donation. To his relief, he was told he would be refunded for the mistake within three to seven business days.

Still, there was a major complication: The $15,000 donation — which more than doubled the total amount raised at the time — would remain on the GoFundMe page until the refund was processed.

“I was like, oh no, that’s a problem,” Michael recalled. Before he explained to Dunan, he started receiving Facebook messages from Shohag Chandra, the charity’s Bangladesh-based program manager, thanking him for his substantial donation.

“The man had sent me a video of himself from Bangladesh, surrounded by dozens of hungry people holding bags of food, thanking me BY NAME.” After Michael watched it, his heart sank. He felt terrible that he had to revoke (撤销) his donation, and he wanted to offer more. Once his original contribution was refunded, he donated $1,500.

【推荐3】Given the chance, 15-year-old Lenny King likes nothing more than to climb over seven foot-high garden fences and run across the busy road to the Co-op, which he associates with free biscuits. His sister Daisy, 17, frequently falls over, and she was told she’d never walk.

The eldest, 19-year-old Rosie, might launch into an outburst of swearing (咒骂) at any moment. The King family are special in a number of ways. Not only are all three children on the autism (自闭症) spectrum, but their parents — rather than see their situation as at best unlucky and at worst a curse (诅咒) — regard it as a blessing. “In some ways my children are forever young, so while in most families the children grow up and pull away from their parents, mine continue to be a source of childlike surprises,” says Mum Sharon, 47.

Sharon and Richard King met in a Wakefield nightclub. Sharon had a normal pregnancy (怀孕) and gave birth to Rosie, who was a highly developed youngster. While her parents thought her “a bit different”, they saw no reason to be concerned about having a second child. Two years later Daisy was born and, within 12 months, she was diagnosed (诊断) with the rare genetic condition Kabuki Syndrome which is a rare, multi-system disorder characterized by abnormalities including distinctive facial features, growth delays, varying degrees of intellectual disability.

The Kings were told that Daisy may never walk or talk, though she proved the doctors wrong in the first instance by getting to her feet, aged five. Sharon and Richard, a 52-year-old civil engineer, were also advised to think carefully about having any more children. At that point Sharon was already six months pregnant with Lenny. When their son was 18 months old, the Kings noticed that he wasn’t meeting his developmental milestones and doctors raised the possibility that he might be autistic. Lenny was finally diagnosed with classic autism before his third birthday, which then raised questions about nine-year-old Rosie. Tests revealed she had high functioning Asperger’s (阿斯伯格综合征).

Now Lenny and Daisy are collected by an autism resource centre at 8 a. m. each day and returned at 4 p. m. People who are not defeated by suffering are brave warriors in life, and they definitely will have a bright future.